America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation Page 12

  Dewey was soon flooded with a steady stream of new applicants. And in his excitement, he got a bit carried away. On the application form that he designed, he requested some curious pieces of information. Now, he didn’t actually require females to submit their bust size, as generations of incredulous indexers have snickered about (such as the 1971 Library Journal editorial writer who, in referring to this urban legend, wondered, “Like what did you really have in mind, Mel baby?”). But he did ask for a few telling measurements—namely, height and weight—as well as a description of hair and eye color along with a photo. Regarding his discriminating taste in future librarians, he once remarked, “You can’t polish a pumpkin.”

  Unbeknownst to most Americans, who are familiar with his name largely through the use of his signature achievement, the ingenious Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system, America’s pioneering librarian had a dark side. Dewey’s desire to bring more women into the library business was rooted in part in his own out-of-control sexual desire. As one historian has noted, the library school may well have been “a Trojan horse” designed to smuggle babes onto the Columbia campus. While hard evidence for each and every one of Dewey’s alleged extracurricular activities is not available, a pattern is clear and undeniable. Throughout his adult life, Dewey sought out inappropriate relationships with women. In fact, in 1906, this serial sexual harasser was forced to resign from the American Library Association, the organization that he had helped to found a generation earlier, because of his scandalous behavior. A year earlier, as four “prominent women” in the ALA charged, during a ten-day ALA-sponsored trip to Alaska following the organization’s annual convention, Dewey had made unwelcome advances on several librarians. As a highly respected female member of the guild summed up the matter in 1924, “For many years women librarians have been the special prey of Mr. Dewey in a series of outrages upon decency.”

  Like Heinz, Dewey started out as a hyperobedient boy; as a youth, he was constantly trying to please his demanding and chronically stressed-out mother. But as an adult, Dewey would seek to turn the tables. Once he discovered that he could exercise power over women, he would insist that they do his bidding. The man who couldn’t connect first charmed before attempting to dominate.

  Dewey’s career as an organizer extraordinaire began early. By age five, Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey—his name paid homage both to the novelist Herman Melville and to the Hungarian freedom fighter Louis Kossuth—was already arranging and classifying the contents of his mother’s pantry in order to improve the efficiency of the household.

  The adult’s abiding love of order was a direct response to his chaotic boyhood in Adams Center, a small town in western New York, located in the so-called burned-over district, the part of the state known for its Protestant fervor. “It [my home],” he wrote in his diary early in his undergraduate career at Amherst College, “was hurly-burly, scolding, etc. too much, and neither of my parents ever practiced any confidences with me.” Convinced of his “own unworthiness,” Melville (as he was called until he dropped the final le at the age of twenty-five) felt little anger about his difficult circumstances; instead he blamed himself. Straightening up his environment could help him ward off these deeply rooted feelings of shame. He spent many an afternoon cleaning up the yard, the cellar, and the woodshed as well as picking up stones, plowing the garden, and polishing his mother’s sewing machine. As Melville also recorded in his diary, his early years were “as monotonous as the roar of the Niagara.” Dull routines would become a lifelong addiction.

  His mother, Eliza Dewey, was an imposing figure “who never feared anything.” “She was,” Melville later recalled, “famous as was father for being the hardest worker in town.” This industrious Seventh Day Baptist handed off the bulk of the care for her fifth child and second son—whom she would refer to as “her baby” well into his thirties—to her eldest daughter, Mate, then in late adolescence. Her neglect would have long-lasting effects, as would the torrent of austere maxims and scary injunctions that flowed from her lips. “Praise to the face,” she insisted, “is an open disgrace.” “Don’t waste” was oft repeated. Her thrift knew no bounds. After Melville became a successful adult, she would ask him to send back his old shirts, which she would then fix up for her husband, Joel Dewey, a perpetually struggling merchant.

  This nineteenth-century Tiger Mother could also hold her own in mano a mano combat with feral creatures. At the age of two, Melville was grabbed by a huge dog that proceeded to rip out chunks of skin near his left eye. Hearing the screams, the local doctor hopped off his horse and tried to intercede, but to no avail. In contrast, as soon as Eliza put down her sewing and spotted the fight, she immediately wrested the toddler out of the dog’s jaws.

  Melville’s father also deferred to the domineering woman of the house. A devout Baptist like his wife, Joel Dewey was a boot maker who ran a general store that sold everything from groceries to farm supplies. The timid shopkeeper never could refuse to let his customers—even ne’er-do-wells—buy on credit. The elder Dewey routinely accepted old cows and pigs as a substitute for cash. At thirteen, Melville began waiting on his father’s customers after school. Not long after that, the avid reader—as an adolescent, he devoured all five volumes of Lord Macaulay’s History of England—first went into the library business. (Like Jefferson, he was no fan of the novel; he called fiction the “deadly enemy of mental power.”) In a corner of the store, he maintained a small collection of books, which he would rent for two cents a day. After taking a bookkeeping course, this whiz with figures, who would later win Amherst College’s prestigious Walker Math Prize, did a complete inventory of his father’s wares. Melville initially hoped simply to improve the store’s methods. But his digging around led to the discovery of a staggering 155 promissory notes, of which 133 were no longer valid. Melville’s calculations revealed that his father was actually losing money. In 1869, at the urging of his youngest child, a reluctant Joel Dewey sold the store. Melville and his parents then moved into the home of his elder brother, Manfred, a well-to-do piano salesman, in the neighboring town of Oneida.

  Having attempted to fix his family’s precarious finances, the grandiose seventeen-year-old turned his attention to reforming the world. Though he would soon shed his rigid Baptist beliefs, for the rest of his life he would infuse his work with evangelical zeal. The late adolescent, who never openly rebelled against his parents, began railing against “old fogies who are continually croaking ‘let well enough alone.’” A technology lover, enthralled by the “elegance and speed of the steamboat and railroad,” Melville sought to liberate the engines of progress. In November 1869, he settled on a cause that would occupy (and preoccupy) him for the rest of his life: “I wish to inaugurate a higher education for the masses.… If the time and talent now expended at the shrine of mammon could be devoted to education what a mighty revolution would result.” His work as a librarian, devoted to providing “the best reading for the largest number, at the least cost,” as he later put it in the famous ALA motto, would fulfill this pledge, but in his precollege days, he had mostly tens on his mind. Given that America’s haphazard system of weights and measures resulted in untold waste and confusion, the adoption of the metric system, Melville believed, could help jump-start the entire economy. “But certainly the [metric] system,” he wrote in 1869, “can never be used by the people until it be learned by the people.” Thus he saw it as his mission to right this wrong from the bottom up.

  The very act of measuring was also dear to the young man’s heart. Melville loved translating everything into numbers, including himself. On his fifteenth birthday, he began keeping a chart in which he tracked his height and weight as well as the value of all his possessions, divided into categories such as clothes, cash, and books. He updated these figures on every birthday for the next decade. In 1866, his books—including “his most essential,” Webster’s Dictionary, for which the twelve-year-old had shelled out $10 in 1864, nearly his entire life saving
s at the time—were worth $50; this amount dipped to $45 in 1870 before spiking up to $142 in 1875. In his sophomore year at Amherst, thanks to Professor Edward Hitchcock Jr., who ran the college’s physical education program, he was delighted to have access to a whole new set of data. “My expiratory capacity is 273 cubic inches,” he wrote in a diary entry dated December 10, 1871, “chest 38 in passive, full 39 in, arm 12.75 in, fore arm 11.25 in (all as taken by Dr. H).” (As he also noted, he actually compiled these “birthday statistics” the night before; that year, he resorted to this “Irishy way” of keeping his diary because the tenth fell on a Sunday.) Numerical measurements, even those that weren’t expressed metrically, had a remarkable power to induce feelings of calm. “I feel well repaid for the time spent,” he observed at the end of that birthday entry, “since these results…make me feel more safe and certain.”

  “The 900 of 020 [was]…dark before 1873.”

  So wrote Mary Krome, a student at the Florida State College for Women, to Dewey in a congratulatory letter upon his eightieth birthday. Translated from the lingo of the DDC back into English, Ms. Krome’s numbers allude to Dewey’s pivotal role in moving “the history of library science” out of the dark ages.

  At Amherst College, where the small-town boy began his studies in September 1870, he found his true calling. The inspiration came not from any professor or course, but from the $12-a-month part-time job that he landed in the fall of 1872. Soon after the heavily indebted junior began keeping the account books at the college library, he could think of little else but how to organize its thirty thousand volumes. “My heart,” he wrote in March 1873, “is open to anything that is either decimal or about libraries.” That May, he cranked out a preliminary draft of his classification scheme—a system that is used to organize libraries to this day and was the starting point for many research projects in the PG (Pre-Google) Era. After earning his bachelor’s degree a year later, Dewey eagerly accepted a post as the chief assistant to the college’s librarian, William Montague, a foreign language professor. By May 1875, Dewey had put the entire collection in “proper order”; by the end of that year, he had completed his forty-two-page A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library. The following spring, Dewey shelled out a dollar to obtain copyright protection for his forthcoming book, first published later that year.

  Until the Amherst junior got on the case, America’s printed matter—its books and pamphlets—were in a state of total disorder. Each of the country’s roughly one thousand libraries, whether public or academic, relied on its own idiosyncratic classification system. The books at the Amherst library were arranged according to the shelf system, then the most common approach. Catalogers would give each volume a number identifying the particular shelf on which it was to be placed. This method, Dewey quipped, had one advantage—librarians who already knew where a book was located could easily find it in the dark. The disadvantages were many. As the number of books grew, every few years, staff members had to spend countless hours reclassifying and rearranging the entire collection. And empty spaces on the shelves that resulted from lost or damaged books were everywhere to be seen.

  In early 1873, to clean up the mess at his place of employment—he wasn’t yet concerned with organizing all of America’s books—Dewey embarked on a tour of fifty libraries in the northeastern United States. The protocols used elsewhere were little better. Albany’s New York State Library, he was disappointed to learn, “arrange[d] the books alphabetically paying no attention to subjects.” Other systems that organized books by the color of their bindings or by their size struck him as equally ridiculous. Dewey also read widely about the fledgling science of classification. He was particularly impressed with an essay by William Torrey Harris, the director of the St. Louis Public Library, which suggested arranging material alphabetically by subject. Under a relative rather than fixed location system, rather than being assigned a specific place in the library, books would be organized in relation to one another. “Of this,” noted the man, who bonded more readily to abstract concepts than to other people, on February 22, 1873, “I am inclined to be a friend.” But the all-consuming quest went on. “For months,” he later wrote, “I dreamed day and night that there must be somewhere a satisfactory solution.” One Sunday that spring, while supposedly listening to a sermon by the college’s seventy-something president, the pastor William Stearns, he had his eureka moment. He would use “the simplest known symbols, the Arabic numerals as decimals…to number a classification of all human knowledge in print.”

  Surprisingly, the 1876 masterpiece that would turn Dewey into a household name the world over did not list him (or anyone else) as its author. The only place his name appears in the first edition of his scheme is on the copyright page. In the preface, dated June 10 (his half birthday), Dewey lays out his framework. He divides books into ten classes, which are, in turn, subdivided into ten sections and into ten divisions. As a result, all knowledge falls under one thousand headings (one thousand was also the total of the print run). For example, a geometry book was to be numbered 513—as Natural Science is Class 500, Mathematics is Section 510, and Geometry is Division 513. The main difference between this first go-round and the DDC in use today was the absence of the decimal point per se; this addition has allowed for an infinite number of categories. In the second part of the book, Dewey lists the full contents of all ten classes, devoting one page to each. And in the final third, he provides an alphabetical subject index; under G, the reader can find “Geometry, 513” right above “Geometry analytical, 516.”

  Dewey’s work, as he concedes in the preface, wasn’t entirely original: “In his varied reading, correspondence, and conversation on the subject, the author doubtless received suggestions and gained ideas which it is now impossible for him to acknowledge.” But due to its inherent simplicity and logic, his system caught on immediately. The timing couldn’t have been better. The public library, whose origins date back to only about 1850, was about to come into its own. In 1875, the whole country had just 257 branches, and small collections with as few as three hundred books were not uncommon. A huge time and space saver, Dewey’s decimals helped to spark a spectacular growth spurt over the next quarter century; by 1900, America would be festooned with some five thousand public libraries containing more than forty million volumes.

  And since the publication of the original version, twenty-two editions of the DDC system have followed. The most recent, released in 2011, which comes to more than four thousand pages, governs the arrangement of books in more than two hundred thousand libraries across nearly 150 countries. Owned by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), based in Dublin, Ohio, since 1988, the DDC system is not in the public domain, as is commonly assumed. It is still a major revenue engine, as the OCLC charges libraries that use it at least $500 a year. Manhattan’s Library Hotel, which was inspired by the DDC—each of its ten floors corresponds to one of Dewey’s categories (for example, room 800.001 features erotic literature on its shelves)—learned this lesson the hard way; in 2003, OCLC’s lawyers sued the swanky rest stop for book lovers, located across the street from the New York Public Library, for triple its profits, alleging copyright infringement. The two sides subsequently reached an agreement.

  It was just after 5 a.m. on April 10, 1876, and Melvil Dewey was already on the go. He had to catch the 6:15 a.m. train to Boston. After six years in sleepy Amherst, the rapid-fire talker with the high-pitched voice, who had recently deleted the le from his given name because he considered it “Frenchy,” was off to the big city to seek fame and fortune.

  While Dewey was excited to be entering the “busy world,” he was also sad to be leaving “college seclusion.” In Amherst, Dewey had enjoyed some relief from the loneliness and alienation that had plagued his childhood. After graduation, he boarded with Mrs. S. F. Pratt, a wealthy widow of a Turkish missionary, with whom he formed a close relationship. This mother of three young children
asked him both to manage her investments and to help her with budgeting. Dewey, whose own parents had shown him little affection, referred to his landlady as “Mother.” And for the first time in his life, Dewey was popular with members of the fair sex—to make their acquaintance, he rarely missed services at the local Congregational church. With dating as with decimals, Dewey could never get his fill; the peripatetic bachelor would sometimes escort home two or three different women in the same evening. In January 1875, as he noted in his characteristic shorthand, he was courting both Mary E. and “the 34-year-old girl that I lykt so much… [I]… 1/2 thot of wedding.” (Ever since high school, he had griped about the messiness of his native tongue—“English spelling,” he once quipped, “is the wurst there is”—and he would be a lifelong advocate of simplified or phonetic spelling.) But the other 1/2 of Dewey would not budge, and no proposal was ever made to the woman more than a full decade his senior. By March 1875, Mary E. was also out of the picture—though she would pop back in a couple of years later—and Dewey was “having a good time” with both Mrs. H. and Hatty D. All told, between 1872 and 1876, Dewey romanced about twenty different women, including three Marys, three Mays, and three already-marrieds. Attachment to one woman at a time would be something to which he never could quite acclimate himself.

  In an interview in Boston in early 1876, Dewey had finalized his new business venture. It was a dream come true. The publisher Edwin Ginn had signed Dewey on as a junior partner, appointing him manager of the company’s new American Metric Bureau. Dewey’s chief responsibility would be selling educational tools such as scales and charts designed to persuade the entire country to adopt the metric system. Dewey had long fantasized about doing away with America’s “inconsistent system” of weights and measures. In a high school essay, he had argued that the metric system’s “great superiority over all others consists in the fact that all its scales are purely decimal.”